Anybody stopped BF cold turkey? How to avoid mastitis

[MorrisZapp]

My dear mother in law has come to let me move out of the house while my ten week old DS goes BF cold turkey. He is now happily bottle fed (thanks Brenda!) but I have hideously engorged breasts.

I've been pumping off a bit just to ease them, but am very scared of getting mastitis. Anybody know what to do about this?

I have PND and getting DS on a bottle is a huge step in my recovery. I don't want to go back home until my milk has gone, how long might this take and how can I avoid mastitis?

Oh dear! You are going to need to keep pumping and gradually tail off, I don't know anyone who has done a complete cold turkey route, but my best advice would be to pump off every time they start getting hard, but to only take off the milk until the pressure is gone. I think it could take quite a while before your milk has gone completely. I would guess at a couple of weeks to gradually reduce the amount of milk you have been producing.

Keep an eye out for any redness hard areas or if you start to feel at all fluey.

I think your cold turkey method is going prove harder on you than it has been on you lo, hope you are ok.

No, I cut back v quickly when I went back to work, went from EBF to just 2 feeds a day in 3 days. I would say take a breastpump and remove enough to take pressure off so its not uncomfortable. I would have thought within a week it will have dried up enough that you'll be comfortable.

I stopped BF recently for pretty much the same reasons as you - developed PND to the extent where I couldn't care for my son really, and had to hand a lot over to DP and my mum. I also had to leave the family home for a while as I felt like I couldn't be there.

Now, to answer your question... I stopped pretty quickly at 5 weeks in, so milk supply was reasonably well established. All I did was just hand express off when my breasts felt uncomfortably full, but not too much because all that does is tell your body to produce milk to replace the milk that's been removed. I was certainly comfortable within a week, like mumNW said.

Do keep an eye out for any lumps, bumps or blockages. I did get a little lump in one breast - I just massaged it toward the nipple gently while I expressed. It soon went.

I really feel for you - PND is awful. Hope you're getting help and support in form of meds (if you want them) and counselling etc.

Should say though that I am a fairly proficient hand-expresser owing to past experience - if you're not comfortable doing that, or don't find it easy, then maybe a pump is the way to go.